Mendocino County Today: Wednesday 3/20/24

Cloudy | Sea Rocks | Hit & Run | Lake Mendocino | County Notes | Yurok Land | Lemons Sandwiches | Eden Bar | Good Newspaper | Casanova Concert | Engaged Sheriff | Eel Bridge | Ed Notes | Yesterday's Catch | Wish List | Ali & Wilt | Butt Out | SF Waterfront | THC Content | Dairy Tabs | Tribes Win | Lampoon 1973 | Joe Dream | Condor Club | Salmon Alternatives | More Fun | Actor Esposito | Great Compensator | Brahms Cleared | Norwegian Apples | Media Bloodbath | Stable Genius | Remembering McVeigh | Barber Shop

A SHORTWAVE will bring increasing cloudiness and lights showers today. A brief period of dry weather is then forecast for much of Thursday. A more substantial chance of widespread wetting rain, mountain snow, gusty winds, and cooler weather will occur early Friday through the weekend. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): On the coast this Humpday morning I have 49F yes under more fog. The stratus quo continues thru tomorrow then rain returns on Friday. Scattered amounts of rain are forecast daily for the next week.

HAPPY EQUINOX – May all your world be in balance this first day of Spring! (Dick Whetstone)

INJURIOUS HIT & RUN IN UKIAH

On 03-17-24, at approximately 2223 hours, Ukiah Police Department officers were dispatched to the 100 block of Talmage Road for a pedestrian that was struck by a vehicle. 

Officers arrived on scene and observed a female subject in the roadway with obvious major injuries. The vehicle that struck her had fled from the scene. A witness at the scene described the vehicle as being white in color and having a distinctive green tether dragging behind the vehicle. The vehicle information was broadcast (BOLO) to MCSO and CHP. 

Officers and witnesses at the scene provided emergency medical treatment to the female, while waiting for medical personnel to arrive. The female that was struck by the vehicle was transported to a trauma center for treatment. 

A CHP officer located a vehicle that had major damage to the front end of the vehicle and had the green tether hanging from the vehicle. The CHP officer conducted a traffic stop on the vehicle that was being driven by Juan-Jose Naranjo-Rodriguez. 

UPD officers arrived at the traffic stop and took over the investigation. 

Based on the investigation and Naranjo-Rodriguez’s objective signs of alcohol intoxication, Naranjo-Rodriguez was arrested for DUI. Naranjo-Rodriguez was charged with DUI with major injury, DUI with injury having a blood alcohol level greater than .08%, fleeing the scene of an accident involving major injury, and driving while suspended for DUI. 

Naranjo-Rodriguez was placed under arrest for the above listed charges, and he was transported to the Mendocino County Jail after being medically cleared.

The Ukiah Police Department would like to thank the California Highway Patrol for their assistance with this investigation. 

As always, UPD’s mission is to make Ukiah as safe a place as possible. If you would like to know more about crime in your neighborhood, you can sign up for telephone, cellphone, and email notifications by clicking the Nixle button on our website. 

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ON LINE COMMENT: Was the driver illegal? That should be addressed. And yes its important as it would highlight the growing problem of illegal immigration.

ON LINE RESPONSE: Illegal immigrants are the least of our worries. Maybe focus that shitty negative energy on the people at the top that have ruined our once great country by turning us into a freaking reality TV show for the rest of the world. We have people making more money than they’ve ever made before who are still unable to pay their bills. Inflation is through the roof, the housing market is a shitshow, and you’re out here concerned about whether someone who is most likely just struggling like the rest of us has some piece of paper saying they’re allowed to be here? You should be ashamed.

COUNTY NOTES

by Mark Scaramella

WE ARE NOW RELIABLY INFORMED that the Veterans Service Office really is moving back to their original office at the cottage on Observatory Avenue where they were prior to January, although we still haven’t heard a date certain. The Air Quality office will be moved to an as-yet undisclosed leased building somewhere in Ukiah. The “good” news? Things for the Veterans Service Office have returned to a semblance of the status quo ante. The “bad” news? Things have returned to a semblance of the status quo ante. After several months of pointless thrashing and gnashing of teeth in the aftermath of the ill-conceived and abrupt relocation of the Veterans Office, things have finally returned to something more or less similar to the way things were before the thrashing and gnashing of teeth. Most ironic? The approximately $1500/month “rent” that the state was paying to a private landlord for the Air Quality offices that County had hoped to capture by moving Air Quality into the Veterans Service Office cottage is now going to be paid to a different landlord and will not be captured, despite the apparent opportunity to put the Air Quality office into the county-owned Public Health facility on Dora Street. Let’s review just the entirely unnecessary moves involved: Public Health offices rearranged and vacated for VSO, VSO to Public Health, Air Quality to undisclosed leased offices, VSO back to Observatory cottage, unidentified somebodys back to Public Health offices… All for nothing. Is there are metaphor for County operations in general here? Is this typical of Mendo’s executive thinking? Have any lessons been learned? Is anyone accountable? Have the Veterans who engineered this reversal of the County’s decision had their eyes opened? Will the veterans reps continue to “thank” the Supervisors for undoing what they shouldn’t have done in the first place? Have the veterans been energized to the extent that they will engage in other County matters? 

YEARS AGO, before marijuana was legalized, we transcribed a conversation we had with a local defense attorney who was deeply involved in pot cases. We have removed most of the names from the transcription, but the attorney’s blunt remarks are representative of the kind of things that were going on inside the local legal community during the weed wars that normally don’t make it into the public discussion. 

“The problem is this goddamn grant money. The DA’s office is still taking grants. I think they’ve got two grants. They’ve got a methamphetamine cases grants and the COMMET grant. I have this feeling that the grant stipulations and the conditions of grants… I don’t know what they are. I think I’m going to have to use the public records act. I want find out what they have to do to keep the grant. Marijuana cases, I think you have to make a certain number of busts or they look at your productivity at least as far as getting plants. And the more plants you pull up the more money you get and the more money the DA doesn’t have to get from the County. I don’t know how to resolve it. There was a Deputy DA who had a stat rape grant to prosecute the 17 year old Mexican guys who were having sex with 15 year old white trash. But they’re not doing that, I don’t think. The COMMET thing is kind of unconscionable. I don’t think the DA should be doing that. As long as he’s getting that grant money, he and the Sheriff, ultimately they’re both responsible for their soldiers. And they’ve both got their soldiers, although there are only two or three on the COMMET team now, nevertheless they’re still out there going through the friggin’ woods, pulling up everybody’s plants. Both of them. COMMET is essentially the Sheriff. Sgt. Rusty Noe is a Mendocino County Sheriff’s deputy/sergeant. He’s kind of the unrestrained one. The DA can say, Well I don’t prosecute them, and the Sheriff can say, We don’t go after them, but the fact is that Rusty Noe is out there tracking through people’s backyards. He’s doing the same gestapo kind of shit and he’s just takin’ people’s weed. And the stuff really does work for the people who are really bad actors. But lots of them are not. The DA just dismissed another case last week, on this real pathetic guy who I now have as a client. I’m glad he dismissed the case. But that was after the guy had gone to court god knows how many times and his pot supply was gone. He’s dying and he’s in pain and they’ve got his grow lights and everything else. He’s my client. He says he spent two or three thousand dollars just buying raw replacement pot to sell because he couldn’t grow it and he lost his own grow to Humboldt Sheriffs. It’s actually not much of a consolation that they don’t get charged. We get these cases ready for trial and then at the last minute they say, Well, they got these medical things, so we’ll drop it. We say, Well, at least give us the friggin’ weed back! Oh no. We can’t do that, the CHP won’t do it. I have a feeling their destroying it now or burying it. I think it’s under the rubric that We can’t keep it in good condition so we just have to destroy it. They consider it a perishable type of thing. That’s a way of avoiding the question. But then there’s ‘just compensation’ that the Constitution talks about. My client has a legitimate beef, as do other people. I just think they should stop takin’ that COMMET money. The DA is going to say, Well, we’ve got this increase of Mexican growers, and there are! I support the County going after the big plantations, and they can use that as justification. But they’re also still taking ordinary people’s plants, their livelihoods, their only income.”

HISTORIC AGREEMENT TO RETURN TRIBAL LAND

Orick, CA (March 19, 2024) — Today the Yurok Tribe, Save the Redwoods League, National Park Service and California State Parks signed a landmark memorandum of understanding, a historic first step toward transferring ‘O Rew, a 125-acre ecologically and culturally important property, from Save the Redwoods League back to its original steward, the Yurok Tribe. In addition, the agreement describes the four partners’ shared vision for long-term co-management of the site as a gateway for the visiting public to the adjacent Redwood National and State Parks (RNSP). This would be a first-ever cooperative arrangement for the National Park Service and California State Parks on tribe-owned land. The partners envision building a new visitor and cultural center and trails at ‘O Rew that will highlight the distinct histories and cultures of local tribes.

“On behalf of the Yurok people, I want to sincerely thank Save the Redwoods League for committing to repatriate this critical part of our homeland. We are also appreciative of Redwood National and State Parks’ participation in this truly one-of-a-kind partnership. Together, we are creating a new conservation model that recognizes the value of tribal land management,” said Joseph L. James, the Chairman of the Yurok Tribe.…

yuroktribe.org/post/save-the-redwoods-league-the-yurok-tribe-and-park-partners-sign-historic-agreement-to-return-triba

ELIZABETH KNIGHT: Lemons Market (Philo) fresh deli sandwiches are the most talked about sandwiches in all of Mendocino County! Simply The Best!

SO LONG, IT'S BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YOU

Gentlemen,

Received the final issue today with the inevitable announcement. We all knew it was coming at some point, but I'm sorry to find the day has arrived. There will be an unfilled void at the breakfast table now. I'm a devotee of print, so will not be following the on-line publication. I still have Harpers, The Baffler, and Jacobin to read, but Harpers has declined markedly since Lapham left the editor's desk, and Jacobin and The Baffler are quarterlies. And a great magazine still makes a poor substitute for the regular heartbeat of a good newspaper with its “marching columns of grey.” The AVA was a good newspaper.

But history is a function of the past, and we're gifted with the present. Trusting that you'll be carrying on a while yet, may you each manage to harvest some measure of joy from your fresh and ongoing endeavors.

Sincerely,

Long time subscriber and reader

ELENA CASANOVA returns to Ukiah to perform a multi-media concert of music from her native Cuba

Long a Ukiah favorite, the brilliant piano virtuoso, Elena Casanova, has assembled an exciting multi-media concert around her performances of music evoking the flavor of Cuba from years gone by. Incorporating guest artists, graphic art and video projections, lighting and narration, she will immerse us in the riches of the popular art music by composers from her native island. Elena’s passion for this music grew from the beginning of her conservatory studies in Havana at the age of seven and has continued in performance and recordings throughout her career.

Date: Sunday, April 21, 2024 at 2 pm

Venue: Mendocino College Center Theater

Get Tickets to Individual Concert

Following the concert, there will be a catered reception for our season members, to say THANK YOU for your invaluable support and give you an opportunity to mingle with Elena and the other artists. The invitation to join the reception is also extended to new suscribers who purchase their season membership at the concert on April 21.

WHERE THE SHERIFF ENGAGES

Dear Sheriff Kendall,

I very much enjoy and appreciate your presence in the AVA’s “pages,” as well as on your Facebook page. Over here in Lake County, we cannot even get an email address for our Sheriff, and reaching anyone “live” requires calling the “non-emergency” dispatch number or leaving a voice-mail message on any of the other numbers that “answer.” Most of the time, we have to file an online “report” using a system created by Lexis-Nexis (and, since is costs big bucks to use that source, we have no way of knowing what actual citable statutes created the language in the reporting system categories.

In order to report a threatening email, for example, I found no category for that (“harassment” is a category deemed to be “not a crime” — where actual economic costs might be incurred by either submitting the emailer’s “ransom” or paying for complete operating system software protection or removal of malware at the root operating system level. No, I will not pay extortionate rates for Norton or McAffee, either, and just a simple cost inquiry initiated a bombardment of fake invoices and fraudulent “cancellation” notices.

Most importantly, to me, the Office of Emergency Services and the Operational Area Council exclude non-governmental organizations that form the backbone of our Community Organizations Active in Disasters (except for the Red Cross, and even that organization is only quasi-non-governmental — with its Congressional funding out of our pockets).

Fortunately, Lake County is small enough that it’s pretty easy to get to know a lot of people, and a lot of people are truly caring and bright and personally “invested” in the health and well-being of its citizens, even the “unhoused” and “mentally Ill.”

Following the daily reports of dysfunctionality in your central government and the near abuse of volunteer firefighters, and your openness and engagement are simply refreshing and go a long way toward establishing the credibility of your agency.

Officials over in Lake County bemoan the fact that the lake makes it hard to get to some parts of the county, but given the geography and extent of Mendocino’s terrain I’d say you’ve got the worst between the two, plus lots of locals in far flung shangri-las like Leggett and Point Arena who get “involved” and share the community policing load when they can. (Dear Covelo, poor Covelo, a world apart.)

Mil gracias from this side of the Cow.

Betsy Cawn

Upper Lake

ED NOTES

MSA is short for “moving stuff around.” MSA goes way back in my family. I’ve been MSA-ing for 50 years because my annual income has never hit $30,000. An MSA-er moves stuff him or herself with a friend or a relative and a friend’s or a relative’s pick-up. To rise from the MSA class to the next rung up, the U-Haul class, you’ve got to make at least $30 thou a year. I’ve never made it U-Haul class.

I’ve been MSA-ing for almost 50 years now. I’d say it was fate if MSA were karmically grander, but maneuvering unwieldy, old household furnishings up and down stairs now and then lacks the cosmic resonances fate requires.

My most gratifying MSA experience occurred one hot afternoon about 40 years ago when my MSA partner and I decided to heave his 8-foot wreck of a couch off an apartment deck rather than hump it down three flights of stairs. The couch, which also served as the guy’s bed, was none the worse for the flight, although the building manager said he’d call the police if he saw us air-freight any more stuff past his window.

Four decades later — and still MSA-ing — it goes like this:

“Bruce, you’ve got a pick-up truck, right?” 

No denying it. (I did at the time.)

“And a handcart?”

Yup. Bungees too. 

In other words, the basic MSA equipment and a social circle pretty much confined to the MSA income level. I’m reconciled to permanent, on-call MSA. About all I can look forward to is MSA-ing on the Senior Bus — the one with the hydraulic lift.

MSA-ing in San Francisco has its compensations. One Saturday years ago, on an MSA mission in The City, and in between major MSA events, I went to a movie. Hadn’t been to one in a year or so, but I was intrigued by an idiot review in the Chronicle that warned against “Amores Perros,” or “Love’s a Bitch,” because the reviewer warned that the film contained “extremely violent” scenes involving dog fights.

The reviewer was more apprehensive about viewer reactions to the film’s bloody dog scenes than he was about viewer reactions to on-screen depictions of the ultra-vi befalling humans.

In San Francisco, dog people rule, hence canine cultural hegemony.

Judge for yourself, fellow aesthetes, but I thought “Amores Perros” was as intelligent a movie as I’ve seen, offering us a vividly honest artistic rendering of the true state of late capitalism. 

Not to go too Andrew Sarris on you here, but “Amores Perros” is a meditation on the effects of unchecked industrial capitalism on human relations, dramatically presented in class-conscious, anthropomorphic metaphors — dog fights. But the big-screen violence is never gratuitous, and living dogs were obviously not sacrificed to art, not that this viewer would be disturbed if they had been, such was the power of the film. Hell, art is so scarce these days the genius who made this movie could have sacrificed every mutt in town, and the SPCA’s board of directors with them, and it would be cool with me. 

As the lights dimmed and the film rolled, a magnified English language disclaimer appeared. It looked like it had been hastily typed on an old manual by management to appease Frisco’s dog people, whom, the disclaimers must have assumed, could not be trusted to distinguish the Mexican movie dogs they were about to meet from the mass indulgence of canine-centered decadence prevalent in San Francisco. The disclaimer reassured the dog people that the beasts in “Amores Perres” had been scrupulously cared for. If the dog people were skeptical that the movie blood spilled during the make-believe dog fights wasn’t catsup, they could double-check the dubious on-screen visuals with the Humane Society.

Arf! Arf!

The dog people have captured all The City’s public spaces, including the parks, children’s playpens and sand boxes, the sidewalks, and Hippie Hill, where every other sunning derelict maintains an unleashed pit bull. It’s time for a counter-offensive.

Later that evening, after the movie and another round of MSA, I walked down to Valencia Street to check a couple of my favorite book stores, Modern Times and, just up the street, Dog Eared Books. At Modern Times an enthusiastic man with an East European accent was speaking to an attentive audience of 200 people or so. I spotted Jeff Blankfort up front with a tape recorder, which I mention because at the time he hosted the only listenable local public affairs show on Free Speech Radio-Philo and I hoped he’d play a recording of the man on his show.

The speaker was a man named Zizek whose name rang a faint bell with me, so faint I wasn’t sure if I knew it as an imported soft drink or from my wife’s Scrabble dictionary. Like most of my ethno-centric fellow citizens, about all I know of East Europe is Kafka and some of the pre-Revolution Russian writers. Other than these hazy, lit-derived impressions, everything east of New York is pretty much unknown territory. 

But I’ve since learned that Zizek is a Slovene professor famous among post-modern thinkers and the few people capable of grasping their abstractions. Slovenia? Beats me. Over there somewhere east of the Rhine. In heavily accented but perfect English, Zizek immediately reeled me in with a series of opinions that he rightly identified as not having been said aloud among America’s demoralized left “for 30 or 40 years.” 

At the risk of summing up his complicated views, Professor Zizek said that the identity politics with which the American left has been hijacked is essentially a reductionist dead-end; that the kind of phony multiculturalism and weepy, “fetishization of the victim” that preoccupies what passes for left politics in this country diverts attention, energy and the very will to take on the true enemy of mankind — unfettered capitalism.

“When my son asks me what communism was like, I tell him, ‘California’,” Zizek said, and everyone in the crowded room laughed, although I don’t think they’d laugh if an American said out loud that “fetishistic distractions” like gay marriage and hairy-legged women, to name two prevalent PC No-Go Zones the professor specifically cited, represented absurd diversions from the True Prob — lethal free enterprise. If one of us said it, the “As a.....” people who typically dominate audiences at places like Modern Times would be rushing the podium. “As a recovering alcoholic gay single parent with a leukemia cat, I resent.... As a bi-polar renter with a one-eyed son, I resent.... As a self-pitying, solipsistic purple nut case, I resent anybody who won’t sit down and have a good long cry with me....”

But Zizek had the “As a.....” people on task and silently attentive. It was gratifying to hear a smart left presentation unmarred by the professional whiners, but it was also mildly depressing that it took a foreigner to tell an crowd of American lefties things that we’re too cowed by the narcissists and the neurotics to tell ourselves.

“Something vast is happening,” Zizek said near the end of his stimulating and encouraging remarks, but his voice trailed off after he’d limned with his outstretched limbs the ominous recent careenings of global capitalism and the blood-soaked events arising from its inherent instability.

Outside on the street, it was peaceful enough, but not what you’d call reassuringly congenial. The contradictions adding up to looming bad times were everywhere. One out of three people walked fat dogs, small armies of the destitute and the doomed shuffled up and down the street, and oblivious consumers crowded the expensive stores and restaurants. 

HERE IN MENDOCINO COUNTY, slam-dunk de facto censorship on a whole range of subjects prevails in both the print, on-line, and audio media. Forbidden public discussion subjects on the Northcoast include: the true water situation; the funding of the Northcoast media itself, including that of our bogus public radio stations; labor conditions for most private-sector workers; the chemical dependence of the wine industry and the monocultural inevitability of its inevitable demise; the abysmal state of the Northcoast's schools; the ethical corruption prevalent among Mendocino County's legal contingent, including its judges; public sector nepotism; the folly of the Great Redwood Trail; the persecution of the poor by welfare departments; the deliberate defenestration of the Mendocino County Grand Jury by the Superior Court and County officials; the lopsided, overcentralized and invisible financial arrangements on Low Gap Road; the incompetence in the County Counsel’s office, the weekly dysfunction of the Board of Supervisors, and on and on and on. The point: Bad things happen in a media vacuum. For the most part, there is a media vacuum on the Northcoast, where bad things happening is a way of life. 

JAIME VASQUEZ, we still remember the kid. He remains among the permanently missing from Anderson Valley. He is believed to have been murdered.

Vasquez was abducted at gunpoint back in 2001, after he and his young wife and the couple's infant son were lured to a secluded site off Ornbaun Road, not far from the Vasquez’ apartment across the creek in Boonville. Vasquez was taken away by four men, two of them armed. He hasn't been seen since. One of the kidnappers was recognized by Mrs. Vasquez. That kidnapper was arrested and was held on charges related to the crime of kidnapping and the lesser crime of being an illegal alien in possession of a firearm. The suspected kidnapper's identity has never been revealed nor was he formally charged, as detectives pursued his confederates and the truth about the disposition of the missing Vasquez. The suspect's pistol was confiscated by Sheriff's Department detectives when he was taken into custody. This man faced a minimum of 10 years in federal prison.

THE AVA later learned that this man and a second man who fled the area immediately after being questioned by detectives were paid by local drug dealers to abduct Vasquez. The architects of Vasquez's disappearance apparently claimed that Vasquez owed them a large sum of money, rumored to be at least $200,000! Vasquez had moved to Anderson Valley from the Santa Rosa area to work in local vineyards. He was not known to be involved in the drug trade or other criminal conduct, although there is speculation that he had somehow run afoul of Sonoma County drug gangs when he lived there.

TWO LOCAL FAMILIES, widely feared for their ruthlessness by Anderson Valley's large population of Mexican immigrants, were said to dominate a substantial part of this area's thriving methamphetamine trade at the time. Several members of those families are full-time, bi-lingual, bi-national criminals who travel back and forth between Anderson Valley and Mexico, maintaining homes and criminal contacts in both places. The bi-national presence of Anderson Valley's primary drug families has complicated the ongoing investigation of the Vasquez matter, because potential witnesses fear harm to their families, especially their families still in Mexico.

THE SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT took the case very seriously and had a good idea who took Vasquez, but knowing who did it and making a case against them are two different things. Fear of retaliation kept potential witnesses from talking to investigators. The man being held in the County Jail for his part in the Vasquez abduction refused to identify the persons who paid him to assist with it, probably for fear of what might happen to him too.

LOCAL AUTHORITIES undertook several prolonged helicopter overflights of Anderson Valley in futile efforts to find Vasquez's remains. The case remains unsolved to this day.

I WAS INTRIGUED by photos of the old Ukiah ball park which appeared in a recent Ukiah Daily Journal. Dated August 17th, 1950, the photos showed the wooden grandstands, said to have been erected in the 1930s, as they burned to the ground in what authorities suspected was a deliberately set fire. The ball park dated from a time when baseball was the dominant rural sport. Ukiah's — the beautiful old affair someone burned the summer of 1950 — was at the northeast corner of Gobbi and South State where the mammoth Safeway now stands. There was another meticulously maintained ball park out at the State Hospital at Talmage where, as I vaguely recall from a semi-pro expedition north when I was a devoted teen ball player, a strong team made up of inmates and staff pounded us Frisco Grotto 9 boys, prompting a teammate of mine to a memorable non sequitur, "Those guys sure don't play like they're nuts." Most of the communities of Mendocino County fielded weekend baseball teams. Fort Bragg's was legendarily competitive and, at one time, managed by Vince DiMaggio who, like a lot of the ringers Fort Bragg imported to play baseball, worked at the mill when he wasn't engaged at Fort Bragg's ball park, then located on Main Street near the center of town. The greatest of them all, Joe DiMaggio, came north with teams from San Francisco to take on his brother's Fort Bragg nine. Baseball was an important part of Mendocino County life for so many years — the 1920s through the early 1960s — I've always wished that someone with access to these innumerable latter-day grant funds would collect as much of its history as still exists and collect it in a book.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Tuesday, March 19, 2024

JADE BENNETT, Fort Bragg. Parole violation.

CURTIS BETTENCOURT, Fort Bragg. Under influence, paraphernalia. (Frequent flyer.)

VINCENT BROCK, Ukiah. Failure to appear, resisting, smuggling controlled substances into jail.

JHONY CAMACHO-BARBOSA, Cloverdale/Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs.

JENNIFER CRAM, Ukiah. Disobeying court order.

ANTONIO DELOSSANTOS-ROJAS, Ukiah. Explosives, controlled substance, paraphernalia. 

LEWIS DISHMAN, Ukiah. Check kiting, paraphernalia, probation revocation.

SANTOS GONZALEZ-ESQUIVEL, Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

TESLA HENCZ, Laytonville. Alteration of firearm ID, conspiracy.

YONI HERNANDEZ-LABRA, Ukiah. Gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated, DUI causing bodily injury.

JAMIE LECH, Willits. DUI, misdemeanor hit&run.

JUAN LOPEZ, Ukiah. County parole violation.

JUAN NARANJO-RODRIGUEZ, Ukiah. DUI causing bodily injury hit&run resulting in death or injury, suspended license for DUI.

PEDRO PEREZ-GUZMAN, Ferndale/Willits. Felon with firearm, conspiracy, failure to appear, probation revocation.

NOAH SWINT, Laytonville. Assault with deadly weapon with great bodily injury on person over 70 years of age.

WHAT I WANT IN A MAN

Editor,

Original List, Age 22

1. Handsome 2. Charming 3. Financially successful 4. A caring listener 5. Witty 6. In good shape 7. Dresses with style 8. Appreciates the finer things 9. Full of thoughtful surprises 10. An imaginative, romatic lover. 

What I Want In A Man, Revised List (age 32)

1. Nice looking (prefer hair on his head) 2. Opens car doors, holds chair 3. Has enough money for a nice dinner 4. Listens more than talks 5. Laughs at all my jokes 6. Carries bags of groceries with ease 7. Owns at least one tie 8. Appreciates a good home cooked meal 9. Remembers birthdays and anniversaries 10. Seeks romance at least once a week

What I Want In A Man, Revised List (age 42)

1. Not too ugly (bald head OK) 2. Doesn't drive off until 1am in the car 3. Works steady — splurges on dinner out occasionally 4. Nods head when I am talking 5. Usually remembers punch lines of jokes 6. Is in good enough shape to rearrange the furniture 7. Wears a shirt that covers his stomach 8. Knows not to buy champagne with screw-top lids 9. Remembers to put toilet seat down 10. Shaves most weekends.

What I Want In A Man, Revised List (age 52)

1. Keeps hair in nose and ears trimmed 2. Doesn't belch or scratch in public 3. Doesn't borrow money too often 4. Doesn't nod off to sleep when I'm venting 5. Doesn't re-tell the same joke too many times 6. Is in good enough shape to get off couch on weekends 7. Usually wears matching socks and fresh underwear 8. Appreciates a good TV dinner 9. Remembers my name on occasion 10. Shaves some weekends

What I Want In A Man, Revised List (age 62)

1. Doesn't scare small children 2. Remembers where bathroom is 3. Doesn't require much money for upkeep 4. Only snores lightly when asleep 5. Remembers why he's laughing 6. Is in good enough shape to stand up by himself 7. Usually wears clothes 8. Likes soft foods 9. Remembers where he left his teeth 10. Remembers that it’s the weekend

What I Want In A Man, Revised List (age 72)

1. Breathing 2. Doesn't miss the toilet

Deborah Byron

Fayetteville, Arkansas

There’s a funny story behind this meeting. At the time of this picture, Wilt sincerely thought he had a chance against Ali in the ring. Wilt asked his people to arrange the fight and so to “hype” it, they arranged this meeting.

Ali heard that while Wilt was confident, he was also a little nervous too. So Ali had arranged for the meeting to be televised with his friend Howard Cosell moderating. Ali insisted on being there first and when Wilt walked out, Ali yelled out very loudly “TIMBER!”. Supposedly Wilt tried to turn around and leave but his handlers coaxed him back out.

ALTERNATIVE PRINT MEDIA LIVES ON!

Editor,

If only barely, and GAILY!

In the Spring of 1996 I was 31 and in danger of being crushed by the AIDS Crisis all around me. Perhaps the last straw was walking up the suburban block I grew up on (since 1969) and having one of the Moms see me and trot out to inform that the older of her 2 boys - now adultified as “John” - was gone. His heart had stopped @ the age of 32 or 33.

She didn’t mention AIDS, she didn’t need to.

I ran off to a Radical Faerie Sanctuary (Nacottah/Oysterville WA.) I’d read about in the August RFD Magazine. Rural Forward Delivery or Radical Faerie Digest, take your pick. The “Country Journal for Gay Men Everywhere.” Although I was flat broke and asking strangers to tie my shoes, the facilitator, Jim Crow, admitted me and allowed me to stay for a while. The connections I made here enabled me to move on to Seattle and later, Lopez Island. RFD still kicking it out! Also, and more cheekily, no pun intended, the Spring 2024 issue of the much younger BUTT Magazine glossy zine is out!

WWW.Buttmagazine.com!

David Svehla

San Francisco

CANNABIS POTENCY IS FALLING IN CALIFORNIA

by Lester Black

California’s cannabis has long been known for being notoriously strong, but test results from the state’s legal stores show that weed in the Golden State is getting weaker.

Experts say there’s more to the story.

Cannabis potency is usually measured by levels of THC, the most common intoxicant in marijuana. State law requires that all cannabis products be tested for THC content, which means there’s ample data on how strong the state’s weed is.

The median THC potency for cannabis flower has been dropping for the past six months and fell 7% in the past three months alone, according to data shared with SFGATE by Headset, an analytics firm. Headset’s data is based on over 90,000 test results compiled from retail stores and grouped into monthly averages. The median THC potency in December was 30.7%, but as of March 1, it was hovering at 28.5%, according to Headset’s data.

A 7% relative change in THC potency over the past three months may not seem like a lot, but the drop is the result of an ongoing issue with how California labels its pot.

The cannabis potency data printed on pot labels in California has received criticism for years for being inaccurate. Pot shops can charge more money for pot that has higher THC content, and industry observers have accused labs of doctoring test results to give pot companies higher THC potencies. There have been multiple class-action lawsuits filed by customers who say they’ve been ripped off by inaccurate cannabis potency labels and argue this constitutes false advertising on the 

This drop in THC potency reflected in Headset’s data is simply because it’s getting harder to cheat on THC potency tests, according to Zach Eisenberg, a vice president at Anresco Laboratories, a San Francisco lab licensed to test cannabis. The state ramped up enforcement of lab testing rules about six months ago by issuing more fines and license suspensions and rolled out a new THC calculation method in January. These moves appear to be having an effect, Eisenberg said.

“We certainly heard from customers and potential customers that they’re seeing potency values dropping at other laboratories,” Eisenberg told SFGATE. “Some labs were even proactively saying, ‘Be prepared for our results to be lower after this change.’”

Eisenberg said he expects the trend to continue, with labeled potency falling as older products work their way through the system and newer products are tested under the latest calculation method. There isn’t much of a concern that California’s famously dank pot won’t be able to get you high anymore, though. The weed itself is likely staying the same; just the labeled THC figure is changing.

“I highly doubt anything has changed in terms of the actual composition of the cannabis products,” Eisenberg said.

NORTH COAST TRIBES OUTLAST STATE in groundbreaking lawsuit over California’s authority to regulate tribal casinos

by Phil Barber

Several North Coast tribes have outlasted the state in a groundbreaking lawsuit over California’s authority to regulate tribal casinos.

It’s a legal resolution that came and went with little fanfare. One of the parties in the case, the State of California, seems to have made no public comment on it at all.

But those with familiar with Indian gaming law contend the “joint stipulation and order for dismissal” signed last month by lawyers representing five tribes, along with the state Attorney General’s Office, could drastically change the casino industry in California.

“The state has literally been kicked out of the reservation for these five tribes,” said Lester Marston, the Ukiah-based attorney who represented four of them. “The tribes can now operate an unlimited number of gaming machines, at an unlimited number of casinos on their reservations.”

The dismissal of the case ends five years of litigation, preceded by five years of stalled negotiations over gaming compacts, between five tribes and the Governor’s Office, in a case commonly cited as Chicken Ranch Rancheria vs. California.

The tribes’ lawsuit accused the state of negotiating in bad faith but insisting upon conditions not outlined in the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.

In dropping its appeal in Chicken Ranch, the state has effectively bowed out of negotiations over gaming compacts for Robinson Rancheria in Lake County, the Hopland Band of Pomo Indians in Mendocino County and three other federally recognized tribes — the case is named for a band of Me-Wuk Indians in Tuolumne County.

The resolution circumvents a state system that has been in place since the late 1990s and has paved the way for more than five dozen tribal casinos in California.

Instead, the five tribes are now negotiating separate but identical memorandums of understanding with the National Indian Gaming Commission, a federal agency.

“I found it really unexpected the state would just give in,” said I. Nelson Rose, who has spent decades studying tribal gaming law as a lawyer, law professor and government consultant. “If you have good money and you’ve got good lawyers, you can stall for years. They didn’t have to concede right away.”

The Governor’s Office did not answer a set of questions provided by The Press Democrat, but acknowledged the unprecedented arrangement created by the agreement to dismiss the case.

“Unlike secretarial procedures previously issued by the U.S. Department of the Interior for California tribes, these procedures do not allow for a state regulatory role,” a representative from the Governor’s Office wrote in an email. “The federal National Indian Gaming Commission is responsible for regulation of these tribes’ gaming operations and any questions regarding their implementation may be directed to that agency.”

Rose agrees with Marston that the state’s acquiescence will allow the affected tribes to put as many slot machines as they want on their reservations. The Governor’s Office has generally imposed such limits, as well as revenue sharing requirements with nongaming tribes, as conditions for receiving a gaming license.

Rose wondered if the end of Chicken Ranch vs. California would open other doors as well, such as the ability to host sports wagering or internet gambling on tribal land. Marston said no, pointing to conflicting U.S. District Court decisions that are currently interpreted as prohibiting those activities in California.

But the dismissal will almost certainly impact a half-dozen other tribes currently negotiating compacts with Newsom’s office — and with others who may consider suing the state to reopen their own negotiations, based upon this legal outcome.

“We’ve been getting a flood of tribes contacting us,” Marston said.

Since legalization of Indian gaming in California, 80 tribes have negotiated compacts with the state. That includes three tribes in Sonoma County, five in Mendocino and four in Lake. All told, 63 tribes currently operate 66 casinos in California. Two of those casinos are in Sonoma County, three in Mendocino County and four in Lake County.

The Buena Vista Rancheria of Me-Wuk Indians, based in Amador County, sued Newsom and the state in U.S. District Court last August, declaring that certain provisions of their 2016 compact “are invalid and unenforceable as a result of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Chicken Ranch Rancheria.”

The Picayune Rancheria of the Chukchansi Indians, in Madera County, also is considering legal action, according to Marston.

Closer to home, the Hopland Band’s casino — Sho-Ka-Wah, off Hwy. 175 on rancheria land — closed during the pandemic and remains shuttered. But Marston said the tribe plans to reopen in the wake of the Chicken Ranch dismissal, and that “there will be things in the procedures to help them do that.”

At Robinson Rancheria, a small sovereign territory between Nice and Upper Lake, Chairman Beniakem Cromwell said larger California gaming tribes had too much to lose in taking on the state. It was up to overlooked tribes like his to take this stand.

“What’s on my mind is the bravery of the five tribes,” Cromwell said. “I wasn’t chair in 2018. For them, for us, to say we’re going to fight — no one else was sticking their neck out. We could have got it chopped off. The tribes coming after us will get this (benefit), too. And they deserve it.”

The past five years were a grueling game of hurry-up-and-wait, Cromwell said, as the rancheria responded to every hearing and appeal in the Chicken Ranch case. He made several trips to Washington, D.C., to consult with the gaming commission.

“There are so many plates spinning for a tribe and a tribal chairman at the same time,” Cromwell said. “As chairman, this is one thing I don’t have to think about anymore.”

In Marston’s view, it’s a subtler result of Chicken Ranch that might have the greatest impact.

The gaming compacts signed by the State of California have generally been 25-year agreements, leaving a cloud of uncertainty over tribes’ long-term economic planning. Agreements reached directly with the U.S. Secretary of the Interior will exist in perpetuity, allowing tribes a chance to secure 30-year bonds to pay for infrastructure.

“One reason Hopland can’t open up is they don’t have the population base to generate enough revenue to service the debt on the amount of money it’ll take to open up,” Marston said. “That’s because banks won’t give Hopland a loan beyond 10 years. But take that 10-year loan and spread it over 30 years, and get good interest rate because lenders can use bonds — now a little tribe like Hopland can go out and borrow the money they need to create a facility.”

The five tribes in this groundbreaking case, which also included Blue Lake Rancheria (Humboldt County) and the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe (San Bernardino County), first brought their lawsuit in January 2019.

Their state compacts, originally signed in 1999, were set to renew in 2020. But Robinson Rancheria, the Hopland Band and the others objected to a number of provisions the Governor’s Office sought to add to the compacts, arguing that these demands violated the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (or IGRA) that governs all tribal casinos in the U.S.

The case made it to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California. There, in March 2021, Judge Anthony W. Ishii ruled in favor of the tribes on three points, saying provisions regulating spousal and child support, environmental rules and lawsuits on casino property were not proper subjects of negotiation under IGRA.

The decision stunned Rose, who argued that making sweeping, even unrealistic, requests during negotiations is an age-old practice.

“Everyone believes in cutting the baby,” Rose said. “One side demands $10, the other side demands $2 million. So we’ll settle for $1 million. Usually, if either side makes an outrageous demand, the danger isn’t that it will be found in bad faith, as the court found here, but that negotiations will break down and the other party walks away.”

The Ninth Circuit Court affirmed Ishii’s decision in July 2022, ultimately sending the case to mediated “baseball arbitration,” in which the two sides present their last best offers. The arbitrator, retired federal district court judge Raul Ramirez, ruled in March 2023 that the tribes’ offer best comported with federal law.

Two months after that, the office of California Attorney General Rob Bonta signaled its refusal to consent to the decision, automatically sending the compact directly to the Secretary of the Interior.

To the tribes at the heart of this lawsuit, it was a disappointing reaction by the state — one of many, in fact, over a 10-year process that has left them weary, but vindicated and ready to move forward.

“I like to remind people it was Gov. (Jerry) Brown who decided to rule against us,” said Cromwell, the Robinson Rancheria chair. “With Newsom, I was like, ‘Just take the loss.’”

(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

I had a dream. No, not the MLK kind.

My wife called to me from the kitchen. As I entered, I saw her looking through the window to the back yard as she said: “Honey, there’s a naked old man swimming in our pool”.

This was puzzling to me for several reasons, one being that we don’t have a pool. Nevertheless, I went outside and — by cracky! — my wife was correct. A naked old man emerged, with difficulty, out of the pool, his wrinkly skin pale and ablaze in the mid-day heat.

It couldn’t be! But … but it was, it was Joe Biden, and he looked pissed.

“Hey, kid, get me a double scoop, chocolate, with raspberry sprinkles, and make it snappy!”

Irritated at being addressed in this fashion — I’m only a little over a decade younger than him — I ignored his command and instead asked him:

“Joe, when are you gonna quit sending weapons and supplies to the Israelis?”

Joe’s response was immediate and pointed:

“Listen, you lying, dog-faced pony soldier …”

But before he could finish his splenetic outburst, he evaporated in a snowstorm of pixels, taking with him the small puddle of water at his feet.

PFMC ADOPTS THREE ALTERNATIVES FOR VERY LIMITED OR CLOSED SALMON SEASONS IN CALIFORNIA

by Dan Bacher

In another disastrous year for salmon fisheries in California, the Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) at its meeting in Fresno on Monday, March 11 adopted three alternatives for 2024 ocean salmon fisheries off California including two options for an extremely limited season and one for a complete closure.

“California fisheries offer very limited opportunity in 2024 due to the low forecasts for Klamath River and Sacramento River fall Chinook, and constraints surrounding California Coastal Chinook,” according to the PFMC. “Two alternatives for both commercial and sport fisheries offer limited opportunity coastwide, with the third alternative proposed being closed in all areas.

Recreational fishing alternatives would authorize up to seven short open fishing periods ranging from four to six days in length beginning in June and running through October, according to the CDFW.

“Scheduled dates would not be guaranteed and would be subject to two different statewide harvest guidelines. If the total sport catch reaches the limit prior to September, remaining dates prior to September would be canceled. Similarly, if total sport catch reaches the limit for dates scheduled in the months of September and October, remaining dates would be canceled,” the Department pointed out in a statement.

The three alternatives for ocean recreational salmon fishing seasons for the Fort Bragg, San Francisco and Monterey regions are the following:

*Alternative 1 *will feature five potential short periods of fishing: June 5-9, July 3-7, August1-6, September 1-3, 27-29; and October18-20.

In season action may be taken to close open days when the total harvest is approaching a statewide harvest guideline of 10,000 Chinook during June through August, and 5,000 Chinook during September through October, according to the PFMC.

Fishing will be open seven days per week. All salmon except coho, may be possessed, with a bag limit of two salmon per day. There will be a Chinook minimum size limit of 20 inches total length.

In 2025, the season opens April 5 for all salmon except coho, two salmon per day. This opening could be modified following Council review at its April 2025 meeting

*Alternative 2* features a season of July 4-7 and August 1-4,7, 29-31. In season action may be taken to close open days when total harvest is approaching a statewide harvest guideline of 6,500 Chinook.

The bag limits, days open and the Chinook minimum size will be the same as Alternative 1. In 2025, the season will open under the same guidelines as Alternative 1.

*Alternative 3* will be a total season closure.

The Council will make a final decision on salmon seasons at its next meeting on April 6-11, 2024. Detailed information about season starting dates, areas open, and catch limits for the three alternatives are available on the Council’s website at www.pcouncil.org.

“Meeting our conservation and management objectives continues to be the highest priority for the Council,” said Council Chair, Brad Pettinger. “Balancing those objectives while providing meaningful commercial and recreational seasons remains a challenge in 2024.”

In a press release, the CDFW blamed the low salmon stocks on drought.

“In response to several years of drought over the past decade, key California salmon target stocks are forecast to have 2024 abundance levels that, while higher than last year, are well below average,” the CDFW stated. “The 2024 stock abundance forecast for Sacramento River Fall Chinook, which is often the most abundant stock in the ocean fishery, is 213,600 adults. Meanwhile, abundance of Klamath River Fall Chinook is forecast at 180,700 adults”

“ At this level of abundance, the Pacific Coast Salmon Fishery Management Plan authorizes only low levels of fishing on these stocks, and requires management be designed to allow most of the adult population to return to the river to spawn,” the agency said.

However, Scott Artis, Executive Director of the Golden State Salmon Association (GSSA) said blaming the low salmon numbers on the drought doesn’t tell the whole story of why salmon are in such a state of crisis now.

“This season is emblematic of poor water policies that have come from the Newsom administration and California water agencies,” said Artis. “This is more of same stuff that we’ve been seeing to beat down salmon families.”

“It’s not surprising that we are looking at a potentially restricted or closed salmon season this year due to disastrously low return levels that have been caused by low water flows at hot temperatures that kill salmon on Central Valley rivers. Plus right now-we’re seeing the effects of Delta pumps and water on endangered steelhead and salmon,” said Artis.

“These water policies have created a mess for our fisheries and have harmed tens of thousands of salmon families,” noted Artis. “So we’re in an unfortunate situation where salmon are losing, people are losing, the fishing industry is losing and the Bay Delta Estuary and Central Valley rivers are losing. And the economy is losing.”

“If the fish are losing and people are losing, it’s no surprise that the salmon fishing season will be restricted or closed this year. It’s simply heartbreaking,” he concluded. “The only winner is Governor Newsom and his unsustainable agricultural industrial partners.”

The CDFW noted that in-season management and harvest limits are new concepts in management of commercial and recreational ocean salmon fisheries off California. Given the low abundance forecasts and spawner returns in recent years, it is crucial that any limited salmon fishing ultimately authorized be managed to ensure most of the fish return to the river this fall. Use of these strategies in 2024 ocean fisheries is expected to keep catches within pre-season projections.

On recommendation from California and Oregon agency representatives and industry advisors, the National Marine Fisheries Service took in-season action to cancel ocean salmon fishery openers that were scheduled between Cape Falcon, Oregon and the U.S./Mexico border that were scheduled to open prior to May 16, 2024. The sport fishery off much of California had been set to open in early April. Season dates and regulations may be found on the California Department of Fish and Wildlife web page at www.wildlife.ca.gov/oceansalmon.

On March 25, 2024, the PFMC will hold a public hearing in Santa Rosa to receive public comment on the three proposed regulatory alternatives. The PFMC will then meet April 5-11 in Seattle, Washington to adopt final regulations for the season. More information on the three alternatives can be found at this link: https://gcc02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/

GIANCARLO ESPOSITO IS MUCH MORE THAN JUST GUS FRING

by Drew Magary

The next time you’re watching a movie, or a TV show, or even a home video of you and your family, I want you to ask yourself a series of questions:

Am I watching something that has Giancarlo Esposito in it? Is there a chance he might appear in this film later on, perhaps in an unannounced cameo? If Giancarlo Esposito isn’t in this movie, why not? How can we carve out a solid role so that we can ensure Giancarlo Esposito will be a part of it?

If you have no idea who I’m talking about, then consider this post a formal, and necessary, introduction. Giancarlo Esposito is an accomplished character actor who can be seen, right now, in “The Gentlemen,” Netflix’s series adaptation of Guy Ritchie’s 2019 film of the same name. I started watching this show the second it debuted, because I worship Guy Ritchie (when he’s not taking obvious mercenary gigs, like a live-action “Aladdin” reboot that Will Smith deserved to be slapped for), and because I knew that Ritchie had a direct hand in adapting his movie for streaming.

But I also rushed to watch this show because of Esposito. The presence of Giancarlo Esposito in anything acts as a kind of Good Housekeeping seal of approval. If this man has deigned to read your lines on camera, then you did something right. And that’s been the case now across five decades. Here’s Esposito back in 1989 playing the live wire Buggin Out in Spike Lee’s seminal “Do The Right Thing.” Here’s Esposito in 1994’s “Fresh,” one of my favorite movies of all time, playing drug-runner Esteban. Esposito plays his character with such elegant menace that he can rhapsodize to Sean Nelson’s titular character about drugging Fresh’s sister before having sex with her, and make it sound perversely romantic. And here he is as the immortal Gus Fring in “Breaking Bad,” and as the stately villain Moff Gideon in “The Mandalorian,” and …

You get the idea. No matter what project Esposito is working on, he inhabits the role of catalyst. He can be a righteous catalyst, as Buggin Out was in Lee’s masterpiece. He can be a vicious one, as Fring is. Or he can be the sort of villain who orchestrates mass evildoing while keeping his hands pristine. He is the most credible face of evil you’ll ever find. In most movies, evil is obvious. In real life, you often realize someone is evil only after you’ve shaken their hand. They have ill intent, and yet they still feel accessible. Attractive, even. That’s Giancarlo Esposito. Once he enters the frame, you can’t take your eyes off of him, and you can feel the story take on a sinister undercurrent.

This is particularly true with “The Gentlemen,” in which Esposito plays Mr. Johnston, the most cosmopolitan meth overlord you could ever hope(?) to meet. Esposito gets relatively little screen time across Ritchie’s series, but not once do you forget about him after he’s left a scene. Every other character on the show toils in Johnston’s considerable shadow, even if they don’t quite know it. It’s a typically excellent Esposito performance, so much so that this man almost suffers from his terminal consistency. While he has been nominated for a few Emmys, he’s never won one, and he’s never come close to sniffing an Oscar nomination. This is one reason the Oscars are useless.

So I’m writing this post as both a love letter and to rally the Esposito hive. I am not content with Giancarlo Esposito being merely a bankable That Guy character actor for the rest of his career. Esposito already headlines Netflix’s “Kaleidoscope” (that one’s next on my list), but that’s not enough. I crave more. Make him the next Bond. Make him the centerpiece of Scorsese’s next late-career opus. Let him deliver the next State of the Union on behalf of Joe Biden. Have him announce every pick at the NFL Draft next month. Cast him as Sir Web. Give me the Buggin Out origin story. HOLDEN CAULFIELD! YEAH! CAST HIM AS HOLDEN CAULFIELD! I don’t care if that little s—t is a teenage white kid! It’s time we improved on him!

Because this is the power that Giancarlo Esposito has. Not only does he make everything he’s in good, he makes it important. This goes double for Ritchie’s series, which is a manic joyride from start to finish and includes what is easily the finest sequence featuring a man in a chicken suit ever committed to celluloid. So remember that the next time you’re watching any film that does NOT have Esposito in it. Because once you realize he’s not there, you’ll wish he was. That goes for your wedding video, too.

BRAHMS CLEARED; COMPOSER NOT A CAT MURDERER

by David Ward

Johannes Brahms, bewhiskered composer of four symphonies, has been cleared of one of the most serious charges ever levelled at a musical genius — the accusation that he was a serial cat slayer.

For more than a century, cat lovers have accepted as true the allegation that Brahms slaughtered felines, transcribed the sounds of their dying moments and callously incorporated them in to his works.

But research proves that the foul calumny was almost certainly the work of Richard Wagner, a notoriously bitchy composer whose operas go on longer than one of the nine lives of an average mog.

Writing in the BBC Music Magazine, Calum MacDonald, who is the author of a study of Brahms, dismisses the charge on empirical grounds. “In my own limited but miserable experience, dying cats don't tend to make much noise,” he says.

In his review of the evidence, he notes that stories of Brahms killing cats surface mainly in books about cats rather than in books about music “which is suspicious in itself.”

He finds one of the most recent accounts in Desmond Morris's Cat World, published in 1996, which claims that Brahms began cat bagging after the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak gave him a “Bohemian sparrow slaying bow.”

Brahms used to take aim from his apartment window in Vienna, alleges Morris, who then quotes Wagner: “After spearing the poor brutes, he reeled them in to his room after the manner of a trout-fisher. Then he eagerly listened to the expiring groans of his victims and carefully jotted down in his notebook their ante-mortem remarks.”

Morris adds: “According to Wagner, who disliked Brahms, he worked these sounds into his chamber music.”

MacDonald dismisses every detail of this account as suspect and reports that Morris cannot now find the source for Wagner's comments. He also explains that Wagner never visited Brahms's flat, so at best could only have been retailing gossip. Dvorak and Brahms met in 1880, only three years before Wagner died, leaving a very limited time for Brahms to become an expert with the Bohemian bow and for Wagner to get wind of the story, had it been true.

MacDonald adds: “Dvorak would presumably have to have given Brahms the bow in person but their collected correspondence contains no letter saying, ‘Please, Honored Master, accept this amusing artefact from my native land’.”

He then asks: “Is there really such a thing as a ‘Bohemian sparrow slaying bow’?”

“Brahms's ‘apartment’ is presumably his flat in the Karlgasse, which was several floors up, so he'd need a long line to haul up any speared moggies. Did sparrow slaying bows have lines attached? It surely wouldn't be strong enough to haul in dying cats, especially if they were struggling.”

After consulting Styra Avins, editor of ‘Johannes Brahms: Life and Letters,’ MacDonald learned that in 1893 — when Brahms was still alive — a music critic for the New York Times, James Huneker, had cited the story of the composer's hatred of cats as an example of how biography could be contaminated by deliberate fiction. Huneker named Wagner as the guilty man.

“Brahms’s supposed sadism is a malicious fabrication,” MacDonald concludes. Which means the rest of us can listen to the clarinet quintet without fearing that some of its finest moments were inspired by a cat yowling its way to oblivion.

Catty genius: Richard Wagner (1818-1883)

The dramatic radical who took music into new realms of tonality and, with a godlike certainty of his genius, demanded universal applause. He built his own theatre in Bayreuth, Germany, in which to stage the music dramas on which his fame rests.

He proved irresistible to women, including Cosima, daughter of Franz Liszt and wife of the conductor Hans von Bulow, who apparently did not mind losing his partner to an intellectual superior.

Wagner wrote: “I am being used as the instrument for something higher than my own being warrants. I am in the hands of the immortal genius that I serve for the span of my life.”

Trying to find something to say to Brahms after hearing one of his works, he commented: “The evil only starts when one attempts to compose better than one can.”

THE ONLY BLOODBATH IN AMERICA RIGHT NOW IS THE BOWELS OF LIBERAL HYPOCRISY SPLATTERED ALL OVER SOCIAL MEDIA

by Piers Morgan

When Donald Trump became president, he quickly developed a favorite morning hobby.

“I wake up early,” he revealed to me a few months into his tenure. “And if I don’t like what I see about myself on the TV screens in my bedroom, I pull out my phone in bed and tweet something that makes them all change to BREAKING NEWS and a completely different story based on my tweet.”

Then he burst out laughing.

I did, too.

There was something genuinely hilarious about the most powerful man on Earth being able to manipulate the media so easily with just a casual flick of his fingers.

But as a journalist, I also found it very dispiriting that the media were so willing to be manipulated in this way.

Of course, we know why: ratings.

The formula was very simple, for both TV networks and newspapers: Take a Trump tweet, massively exaggerate whatever he was saying, and BOOM — watch those ratings fly.

This went on for four years and became an increasingly ludicrous game that suited both parties.

Trump warned of a “bloodbath” in the auto industry during a rally in Ohio on Saturday.

Trump got his message out, and the liberal-partisan media got to gorge on how terrible he was for both the message and the way he conveyed it.

Meanwhile, Trump’s supporters lapped up his media-bashing, as did liberal viewers addicted to consuming 24/7 Trump-bashing cable news.

But none of this self-serving nonsense served the national interests of the United States of America, or most Americans.

And I genuinely hoped liberal media and politicians had learned their lesson from the Trump presidency and would deal with him differently this time around now that he’s won the GOP presidential nomination again.

As comedian Chris Rock told me, the day after Trump’s win in 2016, when I asked him why he thought the real estate tycoon had triumphed: “If someone’s murdered eight people, don’t go around saying they’ve murdered nine.”

In other words, judge Trump accurately and fairly, or deploy absurdly disingenuous exaggeration and surrender the high moral ground.

Regretfully, they haven’t.

Speaking in Ohio on Saturday, Trump said if he’s re-elected president, he intends to slap a 100% tariff on Chinese cars being manufactured in Mexico and imported into the US.

And he warned: “Now if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the whole… that’s gonna be the least of it, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the country, that’ll be the least of it.”

I watched the whole extended clip several times so I could assess what Trump meant, and there’s absolutely no doubt that he was referring to a bloodbath in America’s auto industry.

That was the context of his comment, not anyone being killed.

And the media, and his political opponents, knew it.

But that didn’t stop them from instantly pretending he’d meant there would be an actual violent bloodbath of people if he wasn’t re-elected.

The Biden-Harris campaign issued a statement, branding Trump a “loser who gets beat by over 7 million votes and then instead of appealing to a wider mainstream audience, doubles down on his threats of political violence. He wants another January 6, but the American people are going to give him another electoral defeat this November because they continue to reject his extremism, his affection for violence, and his thirst for revenge.”

Nancy Pelosi told CNN: “We just have to win this election because he’s even predicting a bloodbath. What does that mean? He’s going to exact a bloodbath? There’s something wrong here … how much more do [American voters] have to see? … you wouldn’t even allow him in your house.”

But Trump hadn’t threatened actual violence at all, and they all knew it.

Incredibly, virulent anti-Trumpers like George Conway even tried to argue that it didn’t matter if he was referring to the auto industry. No, what mattered apparently was his use of “apocalyptic and violent language in an indiscriminate fashion as a result of his psychopathy and correlative authoritarian tendencies.”

This from a man, Conway, whose own relentlessly apocalyptic language about Trump is borderline psychopathic.

All of this is wearily familiar.

After Trump won in 2016, I lost count of how many times he was branded the “new Hitler!” by people on the left, despite the fact he self-evidently hasn’t murdered 12 million people. And they’re at it again now.

Depressingly, we’re back into the same old cycle: Trump says something provocative or inflammatory, and the liberal media promptly go nuts and wildly, deliberately misconstrue what he said.

The only difference now is that X, formerly Twitter, is owned by someone who won’t let them get away with it.

MSNBC star Joe Scarborough posted a tweet saying, “Donald Trump’s America. And he’s proud of it. Promised another ‘bloodbath’ if he loses again.”

But he deleted it after Elon Musk replied: “Trump was referring to job losses in the auto industry when he used that word. Your post is extremely misleading.”

Musk then posted the whole bloodbath clip, showing the context, and so far, it’s been viewed 60 million times!

Trump, naturally, capitalized on the fallout by saying: “The Fake News Media, and their Democrat Partners in the destruction of our Nation, pretended to be shocked at my use of the word BLOODBATH, even though they fully understood that I was simply referring to imports allowed by Crooked Joe Biden, which are killing the automobile industry.”

And moreover, X users quickly reminded the world of all the times liberal anchors feigning outrage have used the word “bloodbath” on air, also without meaning human blood.

As political scientist Ian Bremmer explained: “Exaggeration and misdirection from the media is self-damaging and counterproductive.”

Yes, it is, and the only bloodbath I can see happening in America right now is the left-wing media and political class once again having the entrails of their integrity and hypocrisy splattered all over social media.

(New York Post)

MCVEIGH & OKLAHOMA CITY: REMEMBERING… 

by Alexander Cockburn (2001)

The Date was April 19, 1995.

Drive along Interstate 40 through Oklahoma City, as a I did in late March, and one is encouraged to make a detour into downtown, to whose renewal as a tourist destination Timothy McVeigh made an ironic contribution. From Interstate 40 signs alert travelers to the correct route to the Oklahoma City National Memorial, the only feature of the city deemed worthy of such advertisement. There were maybe a couple of hundred visitors in an otherwise entirely empty downtown. I parked not so far from where McVeigh left his Ryder truck packed with 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil on April 19, 1995, lit the fuse and was driving out of town when the truck exploded at 9:02am, killing 168 people.

There’s a chain link fence with various memorabilia stuck to it, poems by kids, and several irritating statements encased in plastic, written by Dr. Paul Heath, self-described bombing “survivor.” A typical Heath-gram: “The bombing was surely an evil evil act that should not have happened. Because of this evil a white statue of Jesus now stands offsite with its back turned away from the site and facing 168 empty spaces in a black stone wall.”

The acreage previously occupied by the Alfred P. Murrah federal building now holds a big expanse of water bracketed by two modernist “gates of time,” respectively labeled 9:01 and 9:03. South of the pool there are 168 odd looking chairs, with high bronze backs and plastic seats which light up at night, each displaying a name. On a wall nearby there are the names of “survivors.” There’s also a “survivor tree” from the 1920s, an elm that beat not only McVeigh but Dutch elm disease.

The old Journal Record building next door is now a memorial center, also housing an Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. In the shop you can buy a K-9 poster, featuring Bella (L.A. Search Dogs), Butch (Vancouver Fire and Rescue), Bethany (Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics), Keli (Woof Search and Rescue Unit) plus about 45 other dogs that had distinguished themselves in the post-bombing hours.

There’s audio-visual media evocation of the news noises on April 19, 1995, plus an effective tape of a fellow trying to get his permit to bottle and sell water. This proceeding was going on across the street and on the tape you hear the bomb go off and a sententious voice saying that the permit seeker was using government correctly for peaceful ends, unlike McVeigh. This is a theme sounded throughout the exhibition in many different ways, none more vigorously than when lauding the Oklahoma citizens and survivors who rushed to Washington DC to press (successfully) for rapid passage of the Effective Death Penalty Act. These are the same people afforded the opportunity to watch McVeigh meet the Reaper in May of 2001 and die on closed circuit tv.

The memorial is supposed to educate us about terror and about the bombing, yet an uninformed person could spend several hours in it and leave without knowing anything more about the perpetrator of the Oklahoma bombing, beyond the fact that he was white and his name was McVeigh. You wouldn’t know he was born in Pendleton, near Buffalo, that his father was a working man, employed by GM, that McVeigh was an okay student but couldn’t get a job in the Reagan recession of the Eighties that laid waste the old industrial north-east. He did briefly work as a security guard in a warehouse in the awful racist, upstate town of Cheektowaga. Decorated veteran of the Iraqi war? There’s no mention of McVeigh’s military career.

The photographs of McVeigh outside the Branch Davidian compound near Waco during the siege are also nowhere to be found, though they advertise McVeigh’s prime stated motivation, to strike back at the federal government that killed over 80 civilians including 24 children. McVeigh, is certainly more coherent than the memorialists in Oklahoma City, who have produced a self-congratulatory mish mash of kitsch. 

Here are a couple of paragraphs from his handwritten submission to Media By-Pass in 1998:

“Remember Dresden? How about Hanoi? Tripoli? Baghdad? What about the big ones — Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (At these two locations, the US killed at least 150,000 non-combatants — mostly women and children — in the blink of an eye. Thousands more took hours, days, weeks, or months to die.) If Saddam is such a demon, and people are calling for war crimes charges against him and his nation, why do we not hear the same cry for blood directed at those responsible for even greater amounts of ‘mass destruction’ — like those responsible and involved in dropping bombs on the cities mentioned above?

“The truth is, the US has set the standard when it comes to the stockpiling and use of weapons of mass destruction. Hypocrisy when it comes to the death of children? In Oklahoma City, it was family convenience that explained the presence of a day-care center placed between street level and the law enforcement agencies which occupied the upper floors of the building. Yet when discussion shifts to Iraq, any day-care center in a government building instantly becomes ‘a shield.’ Think about that. 

Actually, there is a difference here. The administration has admitted to knowledge of the presence of children in or near Iraqi government buildings, yet they still proceed with their plans to bomb — saying that they cannot be held responsible if children die. There is no such proof, however, that knowledge of the presence of children existed in relation to the Oklahoma City bombing.

One’s impression was that the visitors to the Memorial were unsatisfied by the displays. The Memorial could have offered them so much more, had its organizers opted to transcend self-congratulation and banality. How about a weekly drama or even debate in front of the Survivor Tree about the nature of terrorism, a dissection of McVeigh’s professed motives, a comparison of terrorist acts around the world, perpetrated by states and by individuals. Would not the tourists, some of them retired from the military, have relished an event of this nature?

But the Memorial’s organizers have declined all such avenues of opportunity. Better to sit tight and deal with the onslaught as a vacuum between 9:01 and 9:03, as a terrible piece of bad luck when Mom might not have left her kid off at the child care center on the second floor, when the HUD secretary on the Fifth Floor might have taken the day off, might have stepped back a couple of yards just before the floor fell away. Safer to think of the attack in the midwestern heartland as a matter involving senselessness and bad luck rather than political events and historical circumstances.

McVeigh’s as American as apple pie too, not least in the media-obsessed grotesquerie of his (presumptively) final days, trying to have his “state-assisted suicide” screened on national tv, wishing he could smuggle out his sperm to female admirers, planning to cry out “168 to 1” in his final statement. That’s an evil way to calculate the efficacy of political terror, but after all, look at the outfit that trained him up for his terrible deed.